Oddhop Status Update #3
Phew! I barely made this third monthly update in time! I don't have a new screenshot to show this time, but wanted to show the new MHGames logo I made a while back. The old one was quite badly dated and needed some refreshment, I made something simpler and cleaner looking. 🙂
We've been expanding our closed Alpha-group quite a lot on both Android and iOS (if you want to try the game, drop me a note!). The initial feedback has been great, even though not many people have finished the game, so we haven't really received any definitive data on the difficulty level of the game. If you're part of the testing group, reading this and feeling a stab in your heart, you need to play more! 😉 Okay I'm (partly) kidding, of course. 😄
Speaking of difficulty level: we developed a gut feeling that the Water-levels were actually easier than the Swamp-levels, so we've switched things around: Water-level pack is now II, and the Swamp is III. Not that they need to be exactly in difficulty order (as that varies per person), but I think they're better this way.
Oddhop TODO-list, March 2016
Again, in no particular order, here are the things still need to be done. I added couple of things that I had forgotton earlier.
- Sounds & Music: Not much progress with sounds, I added a couple of effects but we're still missing some. The ambient background soundscapes are still missing, as is the theme song. But we are currently working with a composer so hopefully we'll get the music sooner than later!
- Polish and more polish! See, I removed one instance of "polish" from the list? 🙂 In other words I have been doing missing menu animations, added some campfires to the night levels (for added variety to the existing torches). The biggest polish thing I did was adding dynamic eye movements to the creatures. They now look at various things in the playfield and react to gameplay events. That worked quite well IMHO, added lots of life to the creatures! Definitely was worth spending one Friday-afternoon on!
- Further testing: With the latest Alpha build I pushed today, I made an experiment and switched to using IL2CPP scripting backend on Android (like already on iOS) instead of using Mono. This approach has both pros and cons, so I'm keeping an eye on this and decide whether the time is right to actually release the game with IL2CPP or not.
- Promo stuff: I need to take up-to-date screenshots for both App Store and Play Store, which is going to be painful especially with App Store requiring screenshots for various screen sizes.. I've already done some of that work for the Alpha, but I think I need to retake most (if not all) of them. 🙁
- Launch trailer: This is obviously also promo stuff, but I separated it since it's quite a biggie! Still not sure how I'm going to do the trailer. Clearly the approach I used for the teaser is not good, too much cropping needed which results in mushy looking video. I'm probably going to render the trailer in-engine, so I don't have to learn how to use any professional video editing software! 😄
Not going to do a full list on things I have done since the last update, but here is a brief summary. I've done the social gaming integrations (meaning achievements, leaderboards on both platforms), statistics are now gathered, did the above mentioned eye movements for polish, and our sole In-App-Purchase (ad-removal on Android) works. I've also cleaned up and optimized the code, getting rid of the old and nasty prototype parts. So yay me! Solid progress, even though I have been playing quite a bit of Earth Defense Force 4.1! 😉
See you in a month, maybe?
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